by Sue Margolis
BY NOW Amy had finished slicing the lemon drizzle cake and had turned her attention to the richly frosted carrot cake.
“Where’s Zelma?” she said to Brian. She had just looked at her watch and seen it was a quarter past eight. “Not like her to be late.”
Brian didn’t seem too bothered. “Her bus probably got stuck in traffic.”
Mrs. Zelma Cohen had been with Brian virtually since Café Mozart had opened. A Help the Aged representative had been visiting small businesses in the area, trying to persuade them to take on retirees. Brian didn’t hesitate. The café had been open a few weeks, and he’d taken on two gap-year students to help run it. It turned out that both of them preferred sleeping to showing up for work and were clearly aiming at a gap life. Having decided to let the students go, he found himself warming to the idea of employing somebody older and reliable who possessed a decent work ethic.
Since a true lady never revealed her age, Zelma kept hers strictly to herself, but Amy and Brian agreed she had to be seventy. A tiny, birdlike woman, slightly stooped, she would arrive every morning dressed to the nines. Anybody passing her on the street would have said she was off to take morning coffee at the Savoy. Her honey-gold bouffant ’do was always immaculately frosted. Clotheswise, she favored Chanel-style suits with tiny jackets and pencil skirts, the kind that once had demanded a pillbox hat to set them off. The soft knitted, round-necked jackets were edged in braid and had chunky gold buttons on the breast pocket and down the front. They did up courtesy of tiny chains. Underneath she always wore one of her trademark chiffon blouses with a pussycat bow. She accessorized the suits with good patent shoes and matching, roomy handbags. Her lips were always precisely the same shade as her nails, which were painted every week by “a wonderful girl who comes to the house.”
Since the sixties and until she retired a few years ago, Zelma had worked in the same Marble Arch dress shop—Maison Sandrine in Seymour Place. With a faraway look in her eyes, she never tired of telling Amy how she had “met them all, darling: Lauren Bacall, Grace Kelly, Judy Garland—even the chief rabbi’s wife … the one we had decades ago, not the one we’ve got now. Now, she was a real lady … a bit saggy on top, but she looked a knockout once we got her into a decent bra.”
Zelma had no need to work. Her late husband, “My Sidney, God rest his soul,” had left her well provided for, but Zelma was bored at home. She missed “going to business.” “It would be different if I’d been able to have children,” she would say, looking soulful. “Then there would be grandchildren to visit and spoil, but it wasn’t to be.”
She had been perfectly honest with Brian about how she knew next to nothing about the catering industry, but Zelma turned out to be a quick learner, not to mention a great saleswoman.
When a customer—usually a young woman—ordered a skinny cappuccino and nothing else, Zelma would step in. “Excuse me, miss,” she would pipe up from behind the counter. “If you don’t mind me saying so, you look like you could do with a little something inside you.” Only Zelma—because she was old and motherly and utterly charming—could get away with this.
The woman wasn’t allowed to take her coffee and sit down until Zelma had taken her on a tour of all the wonderful bready comestibles on offer. “Now, then, what about one of these cream cheese bagels, maybe? I tell you, these aren’t your usual supermarket bagels. Oh, no. These are the old-fashioned traditional bagels. We have them brought in every morning from Golders Green. I call them the real McOy-veh!” At this point she would pause for laughter, but none ever came because Café Mozart, being south of the river, wasn’t exactly overrun with Jewish customers. “You’ll have one? Good girl. With a slice of smoked salmon, maybe? You need your fish oils. It’s brain food … Yes? Excellent. Now, then, let me show you our coffee and walnut cake. I tell you, darling … this … this is to die for. Melts in the mouth. It’s like angels dancing on your taste buds. You’ll have a slice? Wonderful. A slip of a girl like you can afford to put on a few pounds. What are you, a size six?”
And she wasn’t even on commission.
BY NOW ZELMA was forty minutes late. Brian and Amy were starting to get worried. “Two years she’s worked here,” Brian said, “and she’s never been late. She’s such a stickler for punctuality.” He paused. “God, what if something’s happened to her? I mean, she’s not getting any younger.”
Just then there was a tap on the door. They could both see Zelma’s agitated outline through the frosted glass. Brian went to open the door.
“Darling, I am so sorry I’m late,” Zelma gasped, barely able to catch her breath. “I’ve run all the way from the corner.” She paused for a moment, hand clamped to her chest, before stepping inside. “I tried phoning your mobile, but you weren’t picking up. I can’t bear letting people down. Not when they’re relying on me.”
Brian said his phone was probably on silent. “Zelma, it’s okay. Take it easy. You haven’t let me down. You’re only a few minutes late.”
“No, I’m not. I should have been here forty-three minutes ago. You should have opened up by now, and I’ve made you late. You’re losing money because of me.”
Brian told her not to be so daft, and Amy took her arm and led her to a chair. “Now sit down and tell us what happened,” she said.
Zelma lowered herself onto the chair. “Bus strike.”
Amy and Brian both looked out the window at the stream of buses passing by.
“No, there isn’t,” Brian said. “There are plenty of buses.”
“I know. I know. You don’t understand. When I woke up this morning, I turned on the wireless, and the announcer said there’s a one-day bus strike, so I decided—since I don’t live near the Tube—that I couldn’t get to work. I thought about phoning for a cab, but I didn’t bother because I assumed they’d all be booked solid. Anyway, after breakfast I pottered about for half an hour or so. When I went back upstairs to get dressed, the radio was still on, and this time there was a different announcer talking about this bus strike. I started listening because I was waiting for Thought for the Day to come on—they’ve got Rabbi Goldman from my synagogue on all week—when the announcer says the strike is in … Warsaw. I was listening to the World Service instead of Radio 4. I don’t know how it could have happened. I’m so sorry. I wasted all that time messing around at home when I should have been on my way here.”
Amy and Brian immediately started hooting with laughter and agreed that it was one of the funniest stories they’d heard in ages.
Zelma seemed perplexed. “But Monsieur Etienne at Sandrine’s would have sacked me for something like that. Back in the sixties, us shop girls used to have to clock in, and if we were more than five minutes late, that was it. You were out on your ear.”
“Well, this is not Sandrine’s and I am not Monsieur Etienne. You are totally forgiven. Now, how about a cup of something before you get started.”
Zelma said she’d have a milky tea—coffee gave her palpitations—but if it was all the same to Brian, she’d prefer to get started straightaway. With that she took off her pink tweed suit jacket and pulled her neatly folded overall out of her bag. “So,” she said to Amy as she slid an arm into the sleeve of her overall. “How did it go last night with that new man of yours?”
Amy explained. Zelma sighed and patted Amy’s hand and told her not to worry, as there was plenty more kasha in the knish. Amy laughed and said she didn’t have the foggiest what that meant but she got the picture.
Zelma patted her hand. “Every lid has a pot,” she said before calling out to Brian, who was in the kitchen. “So, darling, how you getting on with Maddy?”
“Not so good.”
She exhaled heavily. “So what is it this time? A big nose? Bandy legs?”
“Webbed feet,” Brian came back.
Zelma gave an exasperated shake of her head and turned to Amy. “I’m telling you, that boy needs to find a new head doctor, because the one he’s seeing isn’t doing him any favors.”
Mega-earning alpha mummies with four children under eight, a house refurb, and a UN peace deal on the go would dash in, their Burberry cashmere coats flying. Somehow they managed to order coffee and search through their purses for the right change while conducting frantic conversations on their mobile phones, usually with the nanny. “Look, Tracy, I’ve just this second realized that I’ve forgotten the going-home bags for Oscar’s birthday party tomorrow. Be a darling and pop into John Lewis and pick up thirty Nintendo games. Get whatever you think the kids are into. I’ll send a courier over to you with my charge card.”
THERE WERE a fair number of Café Mozart regulars. First there were the authors, journalists, and other media types who worked from home and came in after the early-morning rush with their MacBooks and sat sweating over articles and TV proposals. Several took a real interest in the coffee. They were lavish in their praise of Brian’s espresso and often broke off from what they were doing to ask him about the provenance of this or that blend. Like him they referred to “complex” noses and “astringent, lingering” aftertastes.
Amy couldn’t help noticing how the journalists—inevitably on a deadline—stabbed the keys on their laptops far too hard and kept looking at their watches, after which they always muttered “fuck” or “bollocks.” She could almost feel their adrenaline and couldn’t help feeling jealous. She’d approached a couple of them for advice about breaking into journalism, but each time the message was the same: With the recession, freelancers were struggling across the board. Payments were lower now than they had been ten years ago. A couple of them were kind enough to give her the names of people she could speak to about doing the odd shift. She e-mailed and left voice mail messages, but nobody got back to her.
OF COURSE, it was the mothers who kept Café Mozart going. Without Richmansworth’s stay-at-home mummies, Brian couldn’t have survived. They arrived each morning, after the school run, in small posses. Some would be minus children, having deposited their entire brood at the school gates. Others were accompanied by babies and toddlers. The toddlers always made a dash for the play area in the corner, which Amy had created and filled with books, puzzles, paper, and crayons. Part of the wall had even been covered in blackboard. Brian had needed a good deal of persuading to give up a table for six and turn over the space to children, but he didn’t regret it. The play area had proved so popular that the mothers stayed longer and spent more money.
As the women chatted and fed pastries to their squawking offspring, they rearranged the furniture to make room for more mothers, nannies, and their buggies. Pretty soon—courtesy of the buggies, tricycles, and dolls’ prams—it was practically impossible for Amy and Zelma to squeeze between the tables. They had to wait until everybody was gone before clearing all the coffee mugs, plates of half-eaten croissants, and plastic water and fruit smoothie bottles—not to mention the bits of baby detritus that got left behind: beakers, feeding bottles, dummies, barf-covered muslins.
The mothers and babies were gone by just after eleven. Then Brian would put something soothing on the DVD player—Greig, maybe, or Tchaikovsky. Cue the arrival of arty media types. There was another rush at lunchtime, followed by a brief lull. Then, just after half past three, the mothers were back. This time, though, they were accompanied not only by babies and toddlers but by their irritable school-age children in desperate need of a sugar fix in the form of hot chocolate and a piece of cake.
It was then that Amy missed Charlie even though she knew that at that very minute he was probably blissfully happy watching Nickelodeon with Ned and Flora and stuffing his face with Ruby’s homemade brownies.
AMY KNEW most of the mothers by sight and often got to chatting with them while she was taking orders or clearing tables. To look at, Richmansworth mothers weren’t much different from the women she’d made friends with since moving to Debtford. They tended to be the type of nicely brought up English girls who had been taught that it was vulgar to flaunt one’s money. To that end they wore the same Gap jeans, T-shirts, and Converse sneakers as Debtford mothers. It took a second glance to spot the clues to their wealth: a Tiffany diamond heart necklace here, a Burberry tote there, a Joseph cashmere poncho, albeit bobbly and covered in baby barf. Their hair might be in need of a wash and scragged back into a ponytail, but a closer look confirmed that the blond highlights were subtle and expensive-looking. Their Ugg boots were always genuine and never cheap imitations.
Their conversation was another clue. They chatted about summer holidays, which were taken in rented villas in Brittany or Tuscany. They skied at Easter. Their vehicle of choice was a seven-seater SUV. They all knew these vehicles used too much fuel and discharged filth, but hello—how else were they going to get the whole family plus luggage down to the Devon manor house they were renting for the school holidays? They attempted to make up for their yeti-sized carbon footprint by using organic cotton shopping bags that declared “I Am Not a Plastic Bag.”
In Amy’s part of South London, there wasn’t much money and Tiffany was just a girl’s name. Anyone conducting a social survey outside Charlie’s school would have found young single mums living on state benefits, unemployed dads, and young professional couples, many of them working in lower-paid public sector jobs such as nursing and social work. There was also a smattering of Labor MPs who took the view that if one represented the working classes in Parliament, one should live among them.
If you discounted the hippie-dippy women with their waist-length graying hair and children called Windsong and Patchouli who had fried their placentas with onions after giving birth and never went anywhere without their Rescue Remedy and Gingko biloba, on the whole Debtford folk were down-to-earth types who holidayed under canvas or in rented RVs and served spaghetti Bolognese and bottles of Tesco £3.99 Sauvignon at their dinner parties.
It wasn’t just money that separated Debtford women from their Richmansworth neighbors. In Debtford nobody criticized a working mother for leaving her children with a baby-sitter or at a nursery. It was assumed that she needed to work to pay the bills. By the same token, nobody accused women who chose to stay at home of not fulfilling their potential or letting down the sisterhood.
It wasn’t like that in Richmansworth. There, as in many other middle- and upper-middle-class areas, stay-at-home mothers and working alpha mothers were practically at war.
A stay-at-home mummy—role model: Angelina Jolie, motto: “The best academy, a mother’s knee”—believed that by being permanently available, she was raising well-adjusted children who would blossom into delightful, angst-free adolescents and emotionally stable adults. So she devoted her time to finger painting and making low-sugar wholemeal cupcakes with her brood. She fed them a careful balance of carbs, protein, and vitamins. She was also a firm believer that small children shouldn’t become overburdened by too many after-kindergarten activities. Her kids were encouraged to pursue destressing pastimes such as kiddie yoga, Kindermusik, and tending the plants at the Tots Herb Garden.
An alpha mummy—role model: the former prime minister’s wife, Cherie Blair (lawyer, author, mother of four), motto: “In it to win it”—believed that by combining motherhood with a high-flying career, she was achieving the goals that her teachers and university tutors had set down for her. Moreover, she was proving to the next generation that it was possible for women to have it all. “Discipline” and “determination” were her watchwords. The first thing an alpha mummy did after giving birth was phone her CEO.
These days she was on the treadmill by six, making shopping lists at half past, and on the phone to the Shanghai office by seven, checking the Far East markets. These mothers lived to work. Their offspring—twin boys being coached for Eton, a pretty girl with a part in the new Harry Potter film—were simply another project, to be managed and organized with the same steely efficiency and determination that they used to pull off a takeover or merger.
Because an alpha mummy believed that free time was wasted time, her children were made to fill their after-school hours with mind-improving activities. The nanny was constantly ferrying them between Mandarin, chess club, and Suzuki violin.
Amy assumed that apart from school functions, alpha mothers and stay-at-home mothers rarely met. Their paths certainly didn’t cross at Café Mozart since the alpha mothers were already at their desks by the time the stay-at-home mothers arrived. Their mutual loathing was, of course, well known. God forbid the two groups should ever lock horns. Amy imagined naked mud wrestling with briefcases and breast pumps flying.
Of course, it went without saying that jealousy was responsible for the groups hating each other. Amy would have put money on there being nights when both sets of women cried themselves to sleep, each craving what the rival group had. She had no doubt that despite the day and night nannies, the gardener and the housekeeper, life for alpha mothers wasn’t as remotely glamorous as it was thought to be. Alpha mothers knew that “having it all” came at a price. That price was permanent exhaustion, and guilt about abandoning their children.
Amy suspected that the SAHMs cried because they were bored. After another day spent attempting to soothe cracked nipples and tantrumming toddlers, they surely craved the intellectual stimulation that work provided.